Dog bite has the best unit economics in personal injury and almost nobody advertises for it. Average claim value runs higher than auto, lead costs run lower, liability is usually clear, and there’s a homeowners policy sitting behind it. Meanwhile every firm in your market is bidding against every other firm for MVA.
That’s the short answer. The longer one is that case value and profitability aren’t the same thing, and the case types with the biggest headline numbers are frequently the worst places to spend advertising money.
Here’s how the major torts actually compare.
The four things that decide this
Most firms evaluate case types on one variable, which is what a case is worth. That’s a quarter of the picture.
Acquisition cost. What you pay for a lead in that category. Driven by how many other firms are bidding, which tends to track case value.
Qualification difficulty. How many inquiries you have to sort through to find one real case. This varies enormously by tort and it’s the number that quietly destroys campaigns.
Case value. What the matter is worth, and therefore what your fee is.
Time to resolution. How long until you get paid. Everybody leaves this out, and for a firm managing payroll it might be the most important one on the list.
A tort that pays $200,000 in four years is a different business than one paying $20,000 in six months, even if the four-year case looks better on a spreadsheet. Small firms have gone under waiting on a docket.
The comparison
One caution before the table, and it matters. The case value figures below come from different kinds of sources. The dog bite number is homeowners insurance claims data from the Insurance Information Institute, which is about as authoritative as personal injury data gets. The auto and slip and fall figures come from law firm reporting, because no authoritative national settlement database exists. They’re not measuring quite the same thing, so read them as ranges rather than as a ranking.
| Case type | Meta CPL | Typical case value | Qualification | Time to resolve | Channel fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auto / MVA | $150–$250 | ~$37,000 avg settlement | Moderate | 6 months–2 years | Search and social both |
| Dog bite | $80–$200 | $65,450 avg claim | Easy in strict liability states | 3–18 months | Social, underserved on search |
| Slip and fall | $200–$300 | $15,000–$50,000 | Hard, notice is the problem | 3–12 months simple | Social |
| Premises (other) | $200–$300 | Wide range | Hard | 6 months–2 years | Search |
| Workplace injury | ~$354 all-channel | Varies, often comp | Hard, comp bars many | Varies | Search |
| Product liability | ~$476 all-channel | High | Very hard | 2–5 years | Search and referral |
| Medical malpractice | $250–$400 | High | Brutal | 3–5 years | Search only |
| Wrongful death | $300–$500 | Highest | Moderate, low volume | 2–5 years | Search, referral |
Meta figures come from Pareto Legal’s 2026 reporting and purchased lead pricing from Rankings.io. All-channel figures marked as such come from First Page Sage, whose underlying campaigns ran 2022 to 2024, so treat those two rows as older. Dog bite claim data is Insurance Information Institute and State Farm, 2025.
Where a cell says “varies” or gives a wide range, that’s because the honest answer is a wide range. I’d rather leave it wide than invent a midpoint.
The dog bite case
This is the one I’d push a firm toward first if they’re looking to expand past MVA, and the numbers are unusually good.
Triple-I and State Farm tracked 28,450 dog bite claims in 2025, totaling $1.86 billion. Average cost per claim came to $65,450. Claim volume jumped 25.6 percent year over year, and average claim cost has risen 97 percent since 2016. New York posted the highest average at $92,154, with California and Connecticut behind it. California and Florida see the most claims by volume, more than 2,000 each.
Sit with that $65,450 for a second. It’s higher than the average auto settlement, and it includes thousands of minor claims that never saw a lawyer. Represented cases with stitches, surgery, or scarring on a child sit well above it.
What makes the economics work:
Liability is usually settled before you take the call. Thirty-six states plus DC apply strict liability, meaning the owner is responsible whether or not the dog had a history. The remaining fourteen use some version of the one-bite rule, which requires showing the owner knew. If you’re in a strict liability state, your qualification conversation is dramatically shorter than it is for a slip and fall.
There’s a policy behind it. Homeowners and renters liability typically carries $100,000 to $500,000 in coverage. You’re not chasing an uninsured defendant.
Cases resolve fast by personal injury standards. Most settle in 3 to 18 months.
And the demand keeps growing. Claim counts rose more than 25 percent in a single year, and roughly 4.5 million Americans get bitten annually with about 800,000 requiring medical care.
The catch, and there is one: volume is much lower than auto. You won’t build a practice on dog bite alone in most markets. Treat it as a high-margin complement to MVA rather than a replacement. Also check your state’s rule before you spend anything, and watch for breed exclusions in homeowners policies, because a policy that excludes pit bulls leaves you looking at a defendant’s personal assets.
Where firms get slip and fall wrong
Slip and fall looks like the natural second case type. Everyone falls, the ads write themselves, and lead costs sit close to auto.
The problem is notice. In most jurisdictions you have to prove the property owner knew or should have known about the hazard and didn’t fix it. That single element turns an enormous share of inquiries into nothing. Someone falls in a grocery store, calls you, and the spill happened ninety seconds earlier. There’s no case, and you’ve just spent twenty minutes finding that out.
Average settlements land somewhere in the $15,000 to $50,000 range depending on whose numbers you use, which is respectable, but you’re sorting through far more inquiries per signed case than auto or dog bite requires.
If you run slip and fall, put the notice question into your intake script in the first ninety seconds. How long was the hazard there, was it reported, is there video. Firms that qualify hard on premises do fine. Firms that treat it like auto burn through their intake team.
Why medical malpractice doesn’t work on social
Med mal has the highest headline values in the table and it’s close to the worst place to spend Meta budget. Four reasons stack up.
Lead costs run $250 to $400 and up, because every firm knows what the cases are worth.
Qualification is brutal. You need a real deviation from the standard of care, causation you can prove, and damages large enough to justify the expert costs. Most inquiries are people with bad outcomes rather than negligent care, and telling those apart takes a medical review, not an intake call.
Cases take three to five years. That’s a long time between spending the acquisition dollar and collecting the fee.
And the expert costs mean you have to turn away cases you could win but couldn’t win profitably.
Med mal comes from search, from referrals, and from reputation. Someone who suspects malpractice goes looking. They don’t discover it scrolling Instagram. If you want med mal, invest in content and relationships, not in social ads.
Which channel suits which case
The distinction that governs everything here: search captures demand that already exists, social creates it. That maps onto case types more cleanly than people expect.
Social works when the person doesn’t yet know they have a case. Dog bite is the clearest example. Somebody got bitten, dealt with urgent care, assumed it was unfortunate and over. They aren’t googling a lawyer. An ad reaching them at the right moment is doing real work. Slip and fall behaves similarly.
Search works when the person is already looking. Serious auto collisions, wrongful death, med mal, product liability. Something happened big enough that they started researching, and you want to be there when they do.
Auto sits on both and that’s why it’s expensive. It’s the only major tort where the person is simultaneously actively searching and reachable on social, which is exactly why every firm in your market is buying it.
There’s a practical read here. If your Meta campaigns are underperforming on auto, part of that is structural rather than a creative problem. You’re using a demand generation channel against a tort where demand already exists and everyone is capturing it. Adding a case type where social has a genuine advantage often beats optimizing auto creative for the ninth time.
If you’re thinking about expanding
Four questions before you add a case type.
Can your intake team qualify it? Every tort has a disqualifying question, and it’s different for each. Notice for premises, standard of care for med mal, statute and strict liability for dog bite. If nobody on your intake desk can ask that question competently, you’ll pay for leads and mishandle them.
Do you actually want these cases? Firms run campaigns for case types their attorneys don’t enjoy or aren’t good at, then wonder why signed cases stall. Ask the people who’d be handling them.
Can you wait for the money? Adding a tort with a three-year cycle when your cash flow depends on twelve-month turns is a real risk, whatever the case values look like.
Is there volume where you are? Dog bite economics are excellent and dog bite volume in a market of 80,000 people may not support a campaign. Check the search volume and check your own historical inquiry mix before committing budget.
The general shape I’d recommend: keep auto as the volume base, add dog bite for margin, add premises only if intake can qualify it properly, and leave med mal and product liability to search and referral.
Frequently asked questions
Which personal injury case type is most profitable to advertise for? Dog bite, in most markets. Average claim value was $65,450 in 2025 per Insurance Information Institute data, lead costs run below auto, liability is clear in the 36 strict liability states, and cases resolve in 3 to 18 months. The limit is volume, so it works best alongside auto rather than instead of it.
How much do dog bite leads cost? Reported purchased lead pricing runs roughly $80 to $200, below most auto lead pricing. Fewer firms compete for the category, which keeps the auction cheaper. Verify against your own market, since dog bite volume varies a lot by geography.
Why are medical malpractice leads so expensive? Because case values are high and every firm knows it, so the auction is bid up. Reported Meta costs run $250 to $400 and higher. The larger problem isn’t the lead cost, it’s that qualification requires medical review and cases take three to five years to resolve.
Is slip and fall worth advertising for? It can be, if your intake qualifies hard on notice. You have to prove the property owner knew or should have known about the hazard, and a large share of inquiries fail that test. Settlements typically run $15,000 to $50,000. Firms that screen properly do well and firms that treat it like auto don’t.
Should my firm advertise for more than one case type? Usually yes, but run separate campaigns. Different case types need different creative, different qualification questions, and different landing pages. Mixing them into one campaign gives Meta a muddled signal and gives your intake team no way to route inquiries.
Which case types work better on Facebook than Google? The ones where the person doesn’t yet realize they have a claim. Dog bite and slip and fall both fit. Auto works on both channels, which is why it’s expensive. Medical malpractice, product liability, and wrongful death come from search and referral, since those people are already actively looking.
The short version
Case value is the variable everyone looks at and it’s the least useful one on its own. What matters is what a case costs to acquire, how many inquiries you sort through to find one, what it’s worth, and how long until you’re paid.
Run those four together and dog bite comes out ahead of torts with far bigger headline numbers, mostly because nobody else is bidding on it. Med mal falls to the bottom despite having the highest values in the table.
If you’re running MVA and wondering why leads keep getting more expensive, the answer might not be in your ad account. It might be that you’re competing for the one case type every firm in your market wants, and there’s a category next to it nobody’s touching.